I'm
on the roof of my house, enjoying the view. To the north, about two miles away,
I can hear the announcer's voice booming from a loudspeaker across the East
Bench, as he calls the annual 4th of July rodeo. In fact we've had
three rodeos in three days. Three days of parades, too.
If I turn and face the other direction, to the south, I see almost nothing but the crumpled foothills of the Rockies, wrapped in blankets of Engelmann Spruce and lodgepole pine. On the high plateaus beyond, at over 10,000 feet, the snow has all but melted away, leaving thousands of acres of puddles across the tundra.
I
think people who are fond of nature have reason to feel a little extra happy on
patriotic holidays like this one. For well over half our nation's history, landscape
was a big part of what shaped how we saw ourselves as a people. Pundits
in the late 1700's predicted we would produce more artists than anywhere else
in the world, simply because of the time we spent rubbing elbows with the
woods. We had a national tree, and were awfully fond of it. (At the onset of
the Civil War, some said we should prune it back to stubs to show our state of
moral decline, having taken up arms against each other). In the early
1800's there was a great theological discussion going on in the East, involving orthodox and progressive clergy alike, centered on this question: Is nature
the hand voice of God? Or is nature God Himself?
One
of the most popular books of the 1880's was called Progress and Poverty, by Henry George. Like so many other authors
of his time, he finds a strong link between patriotism and the preservation of unfettered
land:
The free,
independent spirit, the energy and hopefulness that have marked our people are
not causes, but results. They have sprung from
unfenced land. Public domain has given a consciousness of freedom even to the
dweller in crowded cities, and has been a well-spring of hope even to those who
have never thought of taking refuge upon it.
Henry George, 1879
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